Staff Blog: I Love Sunny Saturday Rides!

 

What glorious weather, waking up on Saturday morning with sun streaming through the window I had no excuse but to get out on the Yamaha Fazer8 and ride.

My other half was helping mates at the Bemsee round being held at Oulton Park so with that as the destination I set out on my day’s ride. It’s 140 mile cross country each way, so a decent distance in a day.

There are some cracking roads from home over to Donington, where I picked up the A50, but unfortunately they were a little congested, this gave me time to put into practice the advanced training I had on the course in France recently and also think more about how the bike is handling. I’m having a few issues on more bouncy roads and am going to employ the services of my colleague, Senior Road Tester, Neevesy, to help adjust the rear suspension.

Once on the A50 the traffic thinned and before I realised it I was doing considerably faster speeds than legally allowed! The 100bhp, 800cc is far more responsive than the smaller twins I’m used to riding. I will have to keep my eye on this or I could break my duck in relation to speeding tickets!!

With the round trip being 280 miles I thought it also a good opportunity to start testing my two new helmets. Both Shoei and HJC have introduced lids with the integral sun visor, they look very similar but have a difference in price of around £300 I’m keen to see which is the better lid. I wore the Shoei GT-Air for the first leg of the journey and carried the HJC IS-17 on the bike, switching them over the the return journey. Initial findings are that both lids need a bit of breaking in! I’m going to keep alternating between the two for the next few months and will update you with a full review in due course.

There really isn’t a better way to spend a Saturday, good company, great weather and riding my bike……let’s hope we actually get a summer this year to be able to do more of the same.

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